“Gettin' Jiggy wit It” went to #1 in the US and reached the top 20 in eight other countries. Billboard declared it the #14 song of 1998. The track also received five Grammy nominations, winning Best Rap Solo Performance.

Later, “Gettin' Jiggy wit It” was featured on the 2004 soundtrack for the film Shark Tale, which starred Will Smith.

Although it was once thought that Nas had ghostwritten the song, the rapper revealed in a 2014 Reddit AMA that “Will Smith wrote that song.”

“Gettin' Jiggy wit It” is remembered both positively and negatively by the media. VH1 named it one of the Greatest Songs of the 90s and GQ said in 2015 that it “somehow aged perfectly”. However, Pitchfork called it one of the 7 worst songs of the 90s.

What have the artists said about the song?

According to The Billboard Book Of Number One Hits, Jean Claude “Poke” Olivier (of the production team Poke & Tone) said:

I said we should call it ‘Gettin’ Jiggy With It' and I started doing this cute dance. Everybody was laughing and we didn’t know what to make of it, but once Will wrote the lyrics, Tone and I thought this might be the one. It was magical. It was a cute terminology everybody was using, being jiggy. It was a rap term from Brooklyn, in the streets, and we brought it to the mainstream.